Inlaks Scholars 2017: Dharmakirti Sumant, Dhee, Krupa Desai & Moumita Roy
Here we have the third post and final post in the series that introduces you to the Inlaks scholars of 2017.
Dharmakirti Sumant
Dharmakirti is a Sahitya Academy Yuva Awardee playwright. He has graduated from FTII with a degree in screenwriting. He has been writing experimental plays since the past 12 years, and writing films since the past 9 years.
With the INLAKS OVERSEAS SCHOLARSHIP he will be pursuing MA in Creative Writing in the year 2017-18.
His film career started as the writer for the film ‘Maunraag’ (Marathi-2013) and ‘CRD.’ (Hindi-Eng. 2016) Maunraag was premiered and featured at the ‘Mumbai International Film Festival’ and PIFF. CRD is an independent film, which is shot by Oscar winning cinematographer ‘Daniel Katz’ and was directed by ‘Kranti Kanade', a national award winner director. CRD has premiered at ‘IFFLA’ (Indian Film Festival Los Angeles), and soon it would be featured in London and Stuttgart film festivals. He has also written additional dialogues for the film ‘Phuntroo’.
He has been the recipient of the Inlaks FTII Award amongst other various state and national awards for his plays such as the Jayawant Dalvi Award, the Vinod Doshi Fellowship, the Zee Gaurav award for Best Playwright, the Thespo for Outstanding Playwright. His latest play ‘Binkamache Sanvad’ (Useless conversations) was performed at the 18th Bharatiya Rang Mahotsav.
Dharmakirti aims to tell stories of the dynamic, progressive, ever changing, lonely, and beautifully filthy cities that we live in. He has been experimenting with the forms from realism to absurdism and he looks forward to develop his craft furthermore by doing masters in Creative Writing.
Dhee
As a student of psychology with a keen interest in wildlife conservation, I am in the pursuit of exploring the intersections between the two disciplines. Animal behavior and human-wildlife interaction are two such intersections that I am learning about through working at research projects in different parts of the country. After graduating with a BA in Psychology from Ambedkar University, Delhi in 2015, I spent a year on a Wildlife Conservation Society project called Wildseve which addressed human-wildlife conflict around Bandipur and Nagarahole Tiger Reserves. I then spent three months observing the behavior of Nicobar Long Tailed Macaques in Great Nicobar. Presently I am studying the nature of human-leopard interactions across the different stake holders of leopards in Himachal Pradesh. With the Ravisankaran-Inlaks scholarship, I am going to pursue an MSc in Conservation Biology from the University of Kent. In the future I hope to learn from wild animals as well as humans about the different kinds of human-wildlife relationships that exist.
Krupa Desai
Krupa Desai has a post graduate degree in social sciences from TISS and has completed her Mphil at the School Of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi. Her Mphil dissertation explored aesthetic attributes of political movements. She has a keen interest in questions of visibility, art and aesthetics. She has been associated with the Virasat-E-Khalsa museum, Kochi Biennale 2014 and (en) counters Public Art Festival 2014, in research, curatorial and artistic capacities respectively. She is currently assisting visual research and ethnography on a documentary film project based in Delhi. In Autumn 2017, she will join the History of Art Department at Birkbeck, University of London to pursue her doctoral project on circulation of images in everyday life. She has been awarded the Birckbeck Post Graduate Research Scholarship as well as the Inlaks Shivdasani Scholarship to cover her tuition and maintenance costs at London. When not typing academic jargons, she likes to sketch, read DIY blogs on minimalism and sustainable living and sometimes, cook!
Moumita Roy
Moumita Roy is a film enthusiast and a sound designer. An introvert at heart, she surpassed a lot of inner struggles during her formative years to finally find sound as the medium of her expression. Based out of Kolkata, India, Moumita has worked on numerous short and feature length films, documentaries, commercials both as production sound mixer as well as post production sound designer. She envisions using sound in a wide array of fields beyond the conventional domain of films and has started venturing into sound installation.
Moumita received the National Award for Best Audiography at the 63rd National Film Awards in non-feature film section for the film Edpa Kana(language: Kurukh). The film is about a tribal boy Ashokwho is caught between the dual realities of orthodox village life and his progressive city life as he struggles to speak his mind.
An alumna of India’s premier Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Moumita has received many academic awards such as a merit scholarship from Dolby Laboratories, Inc. and a selection to exchange programme at the National Taiwan University of Arts. Before diving into sound designing, Moumita graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Media Science from Techno India College. She has a brief experience as an educator and also an external examiner. Moumita has also dabbled as a production executive for various television shows during her early years in college.From fall 2017, she will be pursuing a Master’s degree at Aalto University, Finland in Sound in New Media.
During her off time she likes to paint, delve into philosophies to find the meaning of life and travel and enjoys solitude quite a bit. Of late Moumita is embarrassingly trying to master a basic life skill, cooking!
